Aug 03 2008
The Language of Dice
For MadBrewLabs, who celebrated the gamer community in a comment here.
“After two decades of gaming, gamers still impress me with their willingness to embrace strangers. We have a reputation for being introverts, but when we see that same spark of interest in someone else, we tend to shed those barriers and let people in.”
Why are we like that? I feel that it is because, above all else, our hobby is practically a language.
Consider, first off, the importance of communication. Have you ever met someone who hadn’t learned your tongue yet, or been in a position where you couldn’t or could only barely understand the local language? And then tried to explain something, but the concept was outside your vocabulary? Now, imagine you’re in a similar situation, with concepts you want to get across and nobody who’d get them unless you spent an hour giving context, only both you and your listener technically speak the same language. And there you have it: the gap between the gamer subculture and the rest of the world.
The fact that we’re dealing with at least a dialect is beyond argument here. Just look at the average gaming blog or message board and the specialized terminology they fling around. Before you joined the fold (for those of you who have), for instance, wouldn’t you have been confused by a calculus teacher telling one of his students “Toss me a d10, willya?” in preparation to randomly choose someone to do a problem? Or listened to a crowd assigning an alignment—or Virtues, for that matter—to random fictional characters, or trying to figure out how many nova points a superhero was built on? The D&D crowd talk about CODzilla and the Batman Wizard, Pun-Pun the god-kobold and tarrasqueable offenses; players of White-Wolf games who know their worlds can and often do get across an entire set of personality traits with one word (particularly “Malkavian” for the Vampire players and “Cynis” for the Exalted crowd, both of which are as often as not accompanied by eye-rolls). Even people who only know of Call of Cthulhu by reputation will cheerfully joke about taking Sanity damage.
But that doesn’t answer why we’re so welcoming to new blood—not on its own. Consider this as well, though. We’re a minority culture that somehow works in almost every language Earth has to offer. We’re a hobby that requires mass participation. Spreading our systems can help us ensure that they keep being written for. We have community, in blogs and forums and game stores, and expanding our community keeps it alive.
But the most important reason why we’re so welcoming, I think, is that we’re proud of what we do and want to share it with the world, and only the initiated will really understand what we’re so proud of. This isn’t just the storyteller-GMs, nor the mechanics-GMs; jerking tears from your players or making a truly engrossing mystery is no more or less an achievement than making a nearly unbeatable situation out of individually weak elements (Tucker’s Kobolds come to mind). All of us, one way or another, want people to recognize our skill, but how can they if they don’t understand what we’re bragging about?
And it’s after you subconsciously realize this that it happens. Someone catches the die rolling out of your bag and marvels at the fact that it doesn’t have six sides. Or sees you poring over a rulebook and asks what it is (particularly impressive if it’s one of those obnoxiously cheesecakey covers and they’re asking in a neutral tone rather than a scornful one or one that implies they’ve just caught you in the gutter). Or overhears a spirited back-and-forth between you and a couple others trying to rule a game-world and starts seriously listening. Or stumbles upon your campaign art and requests context. Or something. Either way, they’re there, and they’re interested.
What else can we do? We smile at them, offer them a hand or a seat, and tell them what this is and why we do it. And they nod, and ask more questions; if we’re really lucky, they even have ideas. Soon enough, we’ve welcomed a new gamer into the fold.
I can’t actually think of any gaming books that have particularly licentious covers, off the top of my head. Except the Book of Erotic Fantasy, but, well…there you go. Now, fantasy novels, those have some eye-grabbers. Another reason I don’t pick them up often (though bookstore employees seem to have the good grace not to give you funny looks).
Brickwall: What, you’ve never seen Savant and Sorcerer? My friend Sarah refused to read the thing on airplanes because of the cover. There’s also at least one Werewolf splat on the cover of which is a woman wearing pretty much what nature gave her and with only one location worth of strategically placed animals.
MadBrew: Yeah, the taboo thing factors in as well, both ways. I had a friend in college–fantasy writer, worldbuilder, even got me into my first created languages community–whom I still had to explain to very slowly that no, this hobby really was just collaborative fiction with dice and not some sort of dark mysterious cultish ritual thing. And even after that, it took her two or three years to get up the nerve to admit to her parents that she gamed.
Anyway, welcome, and I hope I see you again soon!